Yes, I did all that math too at one point. I watched GennyB's live stream where he set up a MMA producing system with Caithleen's guidance. I used MMA in one of my several play throughs.
I asked Caithleen while we were doing the community server world what fuel I should use for the advanced generator. He said just use Propane. I explained I had a way to make carbon and hydrogen and oxygen easily that would most likely keep up with the adv gen fuel requriements, he said just use propane. He never said why. I could easily convert my system in my current solo world over to using MMA. The adv gen is already fully fueled and its capacitors are full. Honestly I think either works about the same. You can power a MMA producing system off of carrots if you can supplement the oxygen (which is easy to do, decomp water for oxygen and hydrogen). During development I think the idea was for this elegant system that would make 1 MMA for 1 carrot and early you could run it through stirlings and then later adv gens, but it turned out it was 1 oxygen short. That is why the quest line is called I was bad at math.
But I will say Caithleen had some ideas I didn't agree with about the Stirlings. He said long term they wasted hydrogen. I didn't understand that. My system made hydrogen and oxygen for free, no touch required. The advanced generators Caithleen set up had some router system I didn't understand feeding them the carbon and hydrogen to make propane, and this bypass system that would make rocket fuel. When we used the fusion reactor it would burn through all the carbon and shut down, and the entire power system would come to a halt. It happened a few times. You were supposed to throw logs in the decomposer before it got to that point, but when you are building and there are a few people on the server its easy to miss when it gets low. To fix it I would have to disconnect several things and reroute power to get it running again, and then change it back to how he had it. After a few days of that I decided to redesign the entire power system/resource production system/storage system. By then most everyone had stopped playing, there were just a few of us playing every now and then and Caithleen would log on once a day or so. So I spent a weekend, about 32 hours total, tearing the entire base down and putting it back together. The GS community server video on my play list is after I finished that process.
There was one funny moment, Caithleen hadn't logged on in a while and I had half the base tore down. Nothing was working, and there was this huge ugly hole where a wall used to be. He logged on and there I was, with an RR pick in my hand and guilty look on my face. I was like, ok, let me splain.... Caithleen looked around for a few minutes and said, I'd like to see what it looks like when its done. And logged off.
Stirlings can burn minechem hydrogen.
